At its Cisco Live customer conference, Cisco , a virtual interface card, a chassis I/O module and an update of its UCS management software to the UCS portfolio. The extensions are intended to address challenges IT managers face in adopting , controlling costs, and scaling to meet growing business demands.

CISCO LIVE KEYNOTE:

Travelport, a service provider for the travel industry, is using to make provisioning faster and more agile as traffic growth strains the company's network and IT infrastructure. 

"We were spending a lot of IT man-hours cabling individual servers to access switches," says Steven Senecal, manager of global server engineering for Travelport. "There was an increased risk of human errors through recabling, and our business growth was outpacing the scale of our infrastructure."

UCS and its associated products allowed Travelport to deploy 190 servers in six hours, with service profiles for assigned and provisioned, and turned over to other IT teams within three days. The firm turned up another 1,304 blades this week with several hundred more planned by October, just before a heavy travel season with the end-of-year holidays.